Reply #3: Scahill versus Corn [View All]

[happychatter]

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/20/agents_of_change_or_hawks_clintonites

Scahill

"I mean, Bill Clinton’s policies, his foreign policies in the 1990s, really laid the groundwork for much of what President Bush did when he was in office. You had the Iraq Liberation Act, which was passed in 1998, which was the result of a collusion between neoliberal Democrats, neoconservative Republicans. That made regime change in Iraq mandatory. Clinton mercilessly punished the people of Iraq through economic sanctions, the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam. They dismantled Yugoslavia, bombed it. They implemented policies such as the Rambouillet Accord against Milosevic, that was essentially a setup to take away Yugoslavia’s sovereignty, very similar to what Bush did in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion. Clinton hit Sudan. He hit Afghanistan. His free trade globalization policies devastated economies around the world and working people.

And what I point out in my piece is that many of the architects of those policies in the 1990s were not only people who supported the Iraq war in the lead-up and promoted the myth that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, but they are now at the center of the Obama foreign policy team."

Corn

"Now, we don’t know what’s going to happen, because we haven’t seen him make yet a single decision. And foreign policy is often decided in terms of a reaction to what’s happening out in the world in the first place, when crisis comes along and you see how people respond...

And I think we’ll all be looking very closely at some of these first, you know, acts that Barack Obama makes. You know, he has said the priority is to close Gitmo. Regardless of who he’s put on the transition team to talk about intelligence issues, he can be judged according to what he has said—what’s on his to-do list. And if in the first month, two or three, there’s no progress there or he does it in a way that’s problematic, then you can say, look, you know, he’s obviously not sticking to what he said, and he’s probably being influenced by these other folks. But at the same time, if he makes good on some of that stuff..."

Please note that they did not call each other "dummy heads," even in the most pretentious, euphemistic, academic terms.